Metal @ Roskilde Festival

The big hard rock/metal festival in Denmark has clearly become Copenhell. If you are a metalhead, that is the festival to go to. I spoke with numerous people at Copenhell who were not going to the Roskilde Festival simply because there are so few rock and metal bands there these days, even with the Foo Fighters being perhaps the biggest headliner of the 2017 Roskilde Festival.

At the first Roskilde Festival I went to, in 2011, both Iron Maiden and Mastodon were on the main (Orange) stage. Many metal/rock bands bands (Ghost, Swans, 1349, Eyehategod, Autopsy, Graveyard, Electric Wizard, etc. etc.) played other stages. As the years have gone by, Copenhell has grown and Roskilde has decreased the number of metal acts, moved them to smaller stages, and given them start times when few are around (early in the morning or early in the afternoon). The focus these days has moved to hip hop, electronica, and pop.

All of this is creating a downward spiral where fewer metal acts are booked, leading to fewer people interested in metal going to Roskilde, leading to smaller crowds at the metal acts, leading to fewer metal acts being booked, etc. I hope this isn’t my last Roskilde, but a few of the people I talked to said they were likely done if the trend continues.

That said, there were some very healthy crowds on big stages at prime times like for Red Fang and Anthrax (where I took the above photo). If any of the powers that be are reading this, similar acts need to be strung together. For instance, Pig Destroyer went on so many hours before any other metal act that I doubt there were many people there (I wasn’t). And overlapping Neurosis and Anthrax meant that half of the Neurosis crowd split for Anthrax before Neurosis had really got going. Red Fang, High on Fire, Cult of Luna, and Neurosis should have all been on the same day, with only a short time gap between each. Putting each on a different day made no sense.